THOMAS DEATON - ALL KINDS OF CRITTERS

All Kinds of Critters draws from Thomas Deaton’s experience living in New Orleans, Louisiana. Inspired by the people and places in the southern United States, Deaton classifies his work as narrative cityscapes; his paintings contribute to a portrait of a fictional Gulf Coastal city amidst a time of ongoing ecological disaster. These imagined urban scenes reflect the climate in New Orleans and South Florida, two areas which suffer from devastating hurricanes caused in large part by global warming. The streets are constantly sunken beneath the mirror-like surface of stagnant floodwaters allowing animals and plants to encroach on the city and find footholes for themselves in an urban setting. Within this backdrop, each painting focuses on individuals and their lives as they are touched by their environment and other influences ranging from the mundane, to the criminal and supernatural.

For many years Deaton worked exclusively in print media, focusing on woodcuts, screenprints, and engravings. Building upon this experience, Deaton describes his process as attempting to reconcile the differences and similarities between painting and printmaking. Deaton’s paintings utilize skills he learned from printmaking such as the masking and layering of individual colors and the strong mark making of relief prints; his paintings replicate the style of printed material. Vivid colors and geometric buildings characterize Deaton’s style, distinctly urban scenes appear to be overgrown with wild vegetation in a display of nature reclaiming the streets of the city. Amidst these dystopian landscapes, Deaton presents subtle signs of human life, nodding to the sublime relationship of person vs. nature.

In his more recent work, Deaton has been increasingly drawn to digital media. Although his works are not composed digitally, Deaton attempts to recreate a digital-like style in an analog fashion. Specifically, Deaton is inspired by the simplified geometric forms that can at times approach Abstraction, popular throughout the early era of polygonal graphics in video games from the 90s. Deaton’s practice combines fake three dimensionality, isometric perspective, and naturalistic portrayals of plants, animals, and people; creating an apt visual metaphor linking the struggle between the man-made and the natural.